The Weekly Cybers #50
Australia’s treasurer talks up cryptocurrency, Meta dumps fact-checking and loosens hateful conduct rules, federal agencies’ cybersecurity goes backwards, and more.
Welcome
Welcome to what is bound to be a fascinating 2025.
The focus of this newsletter is digital policy and such in Australia, but I’m spending some time on Meta’s recent announcements today because they will certainly have an impact here.
Indeed, they work directly against two online safety issues which have been of concern to the Australian government: misinformation and hate speech.
We also have news that our treasurer is getting keen on cryptocurrency, and that the cybersecurity of Australian government agencies is going backwards. Neither is a good look.
And there’s more, so read on...
Treasurer Chalmers supports cryptocurrency
Australia’s treasurer Jim Chalmers says “crypto has a role to play, and it’s part of modernising and innovating in our financial system”.
“Obviously, the multinational crime element of it is something people are focused on with good reason, but I think we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we over-focused on the downside and didn’t sufficiently focus on the upside.”
Never mind the crime, feel the innovation!
Economics professor John Quiggin disagrees.
“The real problem is that crypto is essentially worthless. A typical crypto asset, such as a bitcoin, is a certification that the producer has performed a complex, but uninteresting, mathematical calculation (roughly, finding an input to a complicated function which produces an output near enough to zero). No one can make any use of this.”
Chalmers’ comments are also at odds with those of Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock. “I don’t really see a role for it in, certainly in the Australian economy or payments,” she said last month.
Meta dumps fact-checking, embraces abuse
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has announced not only that they’re dumping fact-checking, but that they now permit various kinds of content that was previously banned — including a drastic watering-down of its hateful conduct policy.
Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and others, with a total reach of some three billion humans.
Zuckerberg said that fact-checking had led to “too much censorship”. Instead, it will use a “community notes” system similar to Elon Musk’s X, where it’s up to other users to correct the falsehoods.
As The Conversation writes, the loss of fact-checking “doesn’t bode well for the fight against misinformation”.
NiemanLab, whose mission is “pushing to the future of journalism”, said the announcement contained so much bad-faith reasoning that “it’s hard to know where to start”.
There’s even more background at Platformer.
Here in Australia, politicians are unimpressed, what with a federal election coming up.
Despite all this, according to Crikey at least one Australian news outlet, AAP FactCheck, will continue to provide a fact-checking service to Meta for at least another year.
Meta now permits dehumanising and anti-queer speech
The company’s hateful conduct policy now allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
Platformer has obtained some of Meta’s new internal guidelines and has found that they specifically allow referring to homosexuality as a mental illness or denying that transgender people exist. They cite examples which I won’t reprint here.
Meta’s announcement asserted:
“It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”
The plan also includes relocating Meta’s Trust and Safety employees from California to Texas to avoid “bias”.
Reportedly, it’s total chaos internally at Meta right now as employees protest the changes.
Sarah T Roberts, a UCLA professor and author of Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, told 404 Media that, in their words, “with Elon Musk being outwardly antagonistic to advertisers and courting the far right, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta could simply do less and still be seen as a hospitable place for advertisers”.
“This is all to say that Meta already was doing a very bad job with content moderation, and that its policies and actual enforcement already disproportionately affected LGBTQ people. Monday’s changes, then, have cruelty in their specificity and seem like an overt attempt to kiss Donald Trump’s ring.”
One rule for users, another rule for paying advertisers
404 Media is also reporting that while advertisers can post graphic sexual adverts, the same imagery posted by an ordinary user was immediately blocked.
Meta has also blocked links that simply talk about the blocking of such material, and other inconsistent moderation practices.
For more analysis, see this report from AI Forensics.
Meanwhile, Meta has deleted several of its own AI-generated accounts after users noticed they posted sloppy imagery, and tended to go off the rails and even lie.
Government cybersecurity is going backwards
“Federal agencies are going backwards on basic cybersecurity,” reports InnovationAus ($).
Just 15% of entities met the overall minimum Maturity Level 2 of the Essential Eight Maturity Model last year, down from 25% in 2023.
More than two-thirds failed on individual protections like multifactor authentication and privileged access. And the proportion of government entities applying effective email encryption decreased.
On the plus side, “The majority of entities had planned for a cyber security incident, and were ready to respond if needed”.
The scores for individual agencies were not reported.
The data is from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) report The Commonwealth Cyber Security Posture in 2024 (PDF) dated November, which was tabled in December.
Also in the news
- Telstra has signed an agreement with SpaceX Starlink to provide satellite-to-mobile services, starting with SMS this year.
- The new head of the ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) is Stephanie Crowe. She’s been with ASD for 15 years, and among other things has led their technical advice and assistance programs for industry.
- From the Lowy Institute, Australia’s predicament in navigating a new era of techno-nationalism. From semiconductors to rare earth minerals, the increasing tensions between the US and China create some interesting problems.
- NBN Co is installing bird nesting platforms on top of its fixed wireless towers.
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Elsewhere
- The US has announced a voluntary Cyber Trust mark for internet of things (IoT) devices, something the Biden-Harris administration originally announced in July 2023. Australia’s own IoT cybersecurity standards (PDF) became law in October 2024 as part of the Cyber Security Act 2024
- People who frequently use social media, especially those who post frequently, are more likely to have shorter tempers, although correlation doesn’t show which way any causality might flow.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new for us this week. Hey, we’re only just emerging from the holiday season.
What’s next?
Parliament is currently on its long summer break until Tuesday 4 February 2025, which is 25 days away.
We’re still likely to see plenty of digital policy announcements, however, because it’s an election year, and the PM is already on the campaign trail.
DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.